Last year more than 2,500 children went missing in Karachi, Pakistan. The year before, it was 3,000-plus. In the place of stronger, more solid stats, Heart and Soul's Mice, Mullahs and the Begging Mafia (BBC World Service) told the stories of families whose children had been kidnapped.

Snatched from the streets, schools and hospitals, the kids probably become the property of the "begging mafia" – organised gangs who maim healthy children to turn them into street beggars. The bigger the disfigurement, the more cash earned; so those born disabled – particularly the children born with tiny, mouse-like heads – would become even more vulnerable to this frightening slavery.

It wasn't difficult to deliver a grotesque and harrowing picture. Mobeen Azhar's reporting suggested this was the tip of an even darker underbelly; one that connected the religious shrines targeted by the gangs as easy begging spots, to the dangerous cultural superstitions and hokum embedded in parts of Pakistani society. But, for all the weighty severity of the material, as a radio documentary it didn't really work. For one, we didn't hear from any of the children or criminals – a tall order, but one that would have been mandatory in a television equivalent – Channel 4's Unreported World, say – or as a serious piece of broadsheet journalism. In more capable hands, you suspect there would have been more investigative depth and a lot less speculation and simple, storybook narrative.

Plus there was the unnecessary and bizarre strand of docudrama inserted at random: actors employed to wail, "My child! My child was taken from me!" in plummy RP, to serve as a translation of a mother, speaking in Punjabi, being interviewed in the background. Why, was the obvious question? Why not opt for a translator? Why try to add a dramatic edge to a story that didn't need sensationalising, but serious attention?

Light to some serious shade came this week from NPR's All Songs Considered. Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton aired their annual summer releases preview; joyful and mellow pretty much sums it up.